If ever there was a
party that deserved a thorough electoral defeat, it
was the Republican Party in the 2012 United States
Presidential election. The party’s abandonment of
any semblance of principle, combined with
suppression of its principled and intellectual
elements, was responsible for the crushing defeat
dealt to it by Barack Obama and the Democratic
Party. While I am no supporter of, or enthusiast
for, Obama and the Democrats (I was part of the 1%
who voted for Gary Johnson), I must confess that my
intense love of justice is satisfied by the extent
to which the Republican Party has been punished at
the polls. Here, I aim to enumerate the primary
reasons why the Republicans lost, and deserved it.

Reason 1: Suppression of libertarian ideas and
people. If ever there was a political
movement in the United States that captured the
minds and passions of wide segments of the
population, it was the movement spearheaded by Ron
Paul, which began to pick up momentum in 2007 and
which greatly intensified during the 2011-2012
campaign season. The massive enthusiasm generated by
that movement among young people and typically
non-Republican constituencies would have been enough
to result in an electoral landslide for the
Republican Party, had it not been ruthlessly
combated by the party establishment and its allied
news media’s rhetoric, as well as underhanded,
fraudulent, and sometimes even
violent actions at state primaries, state
conventions, and the Republican National Convention.

Indeed, the
rule change enacted by the party establishment
at the National Convention, over the vociferous
objections of the majority of delegates there, has
permanently turned the Republican Party into an
oligarchy where the delegates and decision-makers
will henceforth be picked by the “front-runner” in
any future Presidential contest. Gone are the days
when people like me could, through grass-roots
activism and participation at successive levels of
the party conventions,
become delegates to a state convention and exert
some modicum of influence over how the party is
governed and intellectually inclined. In addition to
the suppression of Ron Paul and his supporters, the
Republican establishment marginalized and denied
debate access to Gary Johnson, one of the most
principled and successful Republican governors in
history – leading Johnson to favor a Libertarian run
for the Presidency instead. Johnson, too, could
easily have garnered the sympathies of voters who
favor civil liberties, limited government, and an
end to wasteful, reckless foreign-policy
interventionism.

Reason
2: Creation of an alternate reality. In the
words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is
entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
The Republican Party, however, constructed around
itself an alternate reality where facts did not
matter. Instead, an entirely parallel universe of
“facts” was constructed in accordance with party
orthodoxy. How ironic it is that the party that was
supposed to denounce political correctness in
universities and culture has itself fallen prey to
the most massive form of politically correct
delusion imaginable – a way of thinking where no
facts are admissible unless they cohere with a
certain preconceived worldview! It is one matter to
have a set of normative positions about
what is desirable – even if they are wrong or
damaging positions but still based on the data of
reality. It is entirely another matter to begin to
make short-term empirical predictions based
on ideology and wishes, rather than the evidence of
the senses and the general factual inferences that
can be drawn from such evidence. This is why, on the
eve of the elections, virtually the entire
Republican punditry was predicting a landslide win
for Mitt Romney and accusing objective election
observers who anticipated an Obama win of exhibiting
a left-wing bias. But the malaise goes deeper than
that. The entire advertising and rhetorical strategy
of the Romney campaign was based on outright,
publicly debunked falsehoods – from the claim that
Obama “gutted
welfare reform” to the
easily refutable allegation that Jeep was
relocating its plants from Ohio to China. But when
fact-checking services from all over the political
spectrum (including truly neutral ones) called
Romney out on these outright lies, the fact-checkers
themselves were branded as biased by the Republican
punditry. The Romney campaign’s blatant distortion
of the truth is a leap beyond the typical promise-breaking
prevalent in American political campaigns. As David
Javerbaum put it, Romney engaged in “quantum
politics” – e.g., “Mitt Romney will feel
every possible way about an issue until the
moment he is asked about it, at which point the many
feelings decohere into the single answer most likely
to please the asker.” The Romney campaign was based
not on the reality of facts, but the “reality” of
political polls and interest groups, the question
not of what is true but what will please whom. This
is what Ayn Rand termed a social metaphysics,
and a key reason why I
compared Romney to James Taggart in Atlas
Shrugged.

"Fundamentally, the Republicans lost the election
because many of them lost touch with any semblance
of truth, liberty, and basic human decency."

Reason 3. The “lesser evil” mentality. It
is interesting, also, that the Republicans never
embrace a candidate with more energy, and never
behave with such intensity of vitriol toward any
doubters or critics, as when the candidate is a man
whom they themselves consider a candidate of dubious
conservative credentials. Mitt Romney, the oft-styled
“Massachusetts moderate“, was surely such a
candidate, as numerous conservative Republicans did
not hesitate to admit, until Romney seemed
likely to secure the nomination. But once the
nominating process was trending Romney’s way, many
of those same Republicans reacted with every
possible tactic to undermine Romney’s opponents and
critics. Perhaps the hatred of Obama (and the
irrational inflation of Obama as the Evil Communist
Atheist Muslim Kenyan-Born “Community Activist” Who
Threatens to Destroy the Very Fabric of America by
many Republicans) led the reluctant Romney
supporters to consider absolutely anybody to be
preferable to the strawman Obama they had built up
in their minds – and also any means to be acceptable
for achieving Obama’s defeat, including lies, fraud,
voter suppression, and violence against peaceful
critics. It is often the case that the mentality of
supporting the “lesser evil” causes people to behave
with the greatest evil. Surely, in their
behavior on the campaign trail in 2012, the
Republicans were by far the more evil party.
Reason 4. Refusal to differentiate based on true
principle. While Romney continued to attack
Obama on the basis of factually false trivialities,
the substantive principles of Obama’s
governance did not come under attack. Completely
absent were any criticisms of drone assassinations
of American citizens and foreign civilians; the
threat of indefinite detention of Americans on US
soil; repeated attempts to control the Internet in
the name of “cybersecurity” or “intellectual
property”; political favoritism and bailouts
directed toward large financial institutions; a
bizarre and perverse surveillance and “security”
state, exemplified by the Transportation Security
Administration’s backscatter X-ray machines and
grotesque full-body pat-downs; the continuation of
bloody and unsustainable foreign entanglements; an
increasingly impoverishing fiscal and monetary
policy; and the escalating devastation caused by the
War on Drugs. Of course, Romney did not wish to
criticize any of these policies, because he would
likely have supported their escalation were
he elected. The substantive policy differences
between most Republicans and most Democrats have
been narrowing over the past three decades. This
election cycle, they have been reduced to virtually
nil – even as the political rhetoric achieved levels
of virulence and polarization unprecedented over the
same time period.
Reason 5. Xenophobia and demonization of “the other”.
It is truly unwise for a party seeking to
win elections to brand entire vast categories of
peaceful persons as undesirable. Yet, in their
rhetoric, this is precisely how many prominent
Republicans portrayed immigrants, homosexuals, the
non-religious, and people whose income is below the
threshold for a positive income-tax obligation. Is
it any wonder that many such individuals chose to
vote against the Republicans, if only because they
wished to secure the defeat of the party that so
vocally advertised its intent to oppress them and
restrict their rights? Perhaps the lessons of this
election will teach the wiser among the Republican
pundits and politicians that collectivistic
demonization of large numbers of people not only
fails to win elections, but it is a generally sordid
practice to engage in. Commentators such as
Sean Hannity seem to have already shifted their
positions on immigration. One can hope that others
will follow suit – though I suspect the changes in
attitude will be too little, too late, especially
with other pundits, such as Bill O’Reilly,
decrying the demographic changes and the alleged
decline of the “white establishment” in America – a
mild expression of the not-so-latent racism and
xenophobia that, unfortunately, still plague too
many in the Republican Party.

Fundamentally, the Republicans lost the election
because many of them lost touch with any semblance
of truth, liberty, and basic human decency. It would
be a welcome outcome if the results of this election
chasten the Republicans to cease suppressing
libertarian ideas and to instead embrace a
full-fledged advocacy of civil liberties –
especially including the right to engage in peaceful
behaviors of which many Republicans may personally
disapprove. The success of ballot initiatives
permitting same-sex marriage in Maine, Maryland, and
Washington, as well as legalization of marijuana in
Colorado and Washington, should teach Republicans
that their advocated intensification of crackdowns
on personal freedoms will find only ever-dwindling
support, particularly among young people. Unless the
Republican establishment dramatically changes its
ways, it will increasingly sink into irrelevance
(though not without inflicting tremendous damage in
the meantime). And, unless it changes its ways, it
will be justified to say of that irrelevance: “Good
riddance!”